A novice philosopher turned equestrian…

Anti-Freeze

All I really remember from last winter is having completely numb extremities and getting snowed in at Tillie’s house. Oh, and flooding my car. But we won’t go into that. I absolutely hate having numb fingers and toes. It’s the worst! It takes so long for me to thaw out and the pain that comes as the feeling slowly returns is horrendous and makes me cry. So…my thoughts are…if I cover myself in anti-freeze…that’ll stop me getting totally frozen and numb. Right?

For a November day, it was pretty warm and pleasant today. The sun was out most of the day and the sky was clear and bright. It was a beautiful day actually. It’s on days like today that I feel very grateful that I am able to work outside. It really was very beautiful indeed. There were a lot of planes going overhead, which I always love watching. I love seeing the tracks they leave across the sky. It was nice to ride in the sunshine again as well.

We rode early today as Kelly had a very full day of lessons. So at 10am, we hopped on board. I was given the ever lovely Mr Fox to ride today. I was quite pleased to be honest as it’s been a while since I’ve ridden him and I do love him. He was pretty good. There was a slight reluctance to work at first, but he soon got the hang of it. He was beautifully responsive the whole time and gave me some lovely smooth transitions. We didn’t do any canter work today as I was quite happy focusing on keeping a nice rhythmical balanced trot. He was working so well for me, and he really did work, that I didn’t want to ruin it by asking him to canter. That’s something I’ll work on another day. He can work so soft and round when he listens properly. It just takes a lot of patience to get him there. Fortunately, I feel quite at ease riding him, so I have no problem giving him the timeto sort himself out.

We have a student dressage competition towards the end of term and we usually have to pick horses around now. I’m rather inclined to put Foxy boy down as my preferred horse to ride for it. It’s only really his canter transitions that let him down sometimes and occasionally he chooses to take off in canter. Which would, obviously, ruin the whole test for me. But I’m tempted to take that risk anyway. We get to ride our chosen horses in the lessons prior to the actual competition anyway, so I’d be able to work on my transitions and controlling the canter in preparation. I think I will pick him you know. There we go, decision made.

So by 11am we’d already ridden and had the rest of the day to prepare horses for lessons, poo pick, clean tack and do the rest of the yard work. I also prepared feeds for tomorrow and rearranged some name labels on stable doors due to the new horse, Tarzan, causing some switcheroos with stabling. He’s quite a sweet horse from what I’ve seen so far. He’s certainly pleasant enough to handle and work around. He let me do his rug no problem and moved back easily when I went in to remove feed buckets etc. He’s a friendly thing and spends a lot of his time with his head over the stable door, looking for interaction. I’m sure he’ll fit in just fine once he’s settled.

There were 6 of us on the yard today so everything was relatively easy. Kelly didn’t get much of a break as she had back to back lessons, but we had everything else covered so hopefully she felt able to focus on teaching rather than needing to worry about the yard. It wasn’t really until the light started to go that I began to feel the cold again. By that point I was also in pain as Bryn decided to place his entire 800 or so kgof weight on my left foot. OUCH. I have a feeling it may be purplein the morning. Bloody horses.

On the way home we stopped off at co-op to buy pizza because we simply couldn’t be bothered to do anything else. I also splashed out and bought some Ben and Jerries because it was on half price and I haven’t had any in forever. I felt like we needed a little bit of luxury tonight given that we got so chilly and tired today.